page_title: Rohingya genocide
hierarchical_section_title: Rohingya genocide
caption_attribution_description: Aerial view of a burned Rohingya village in Rakhine state, Myanmar - September 2017
context_page_description: The Rohingya genocide is a series of ongoing persecutions by the Myanmar government against the Muslim Rohingya people. The genocide has consisted of two phases to date: the first occurred from October 2016 to January 2017 and the second has been occurring since August 2017. The crisis forced over a million Rohingya to flee to other countries. Most fled to Bangladesh while others escaped to India, Thailand, Malaysia, and other parts of South and Southeast Asia.
  The largest wave of Rohingya to flee Myanmar happened in 2017, which resulted in the largest human exodus in Asia since the Vietnam War.
  The 2016 military crackdown on the Rohingya people drew criticism from the UN, the human rights group Amnesty International, the U.S. Department of State, the government of neighboring Bangladesh, and the government of Malaysia. The Burmese leader and State Counsellor and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi has been criticized for her inaction and silence over the issue and has done little to prevent military abuses. Myanmar has also drawn criticism for the prosecutions of journalists under her leadership.
context_section_description: The Rohingya genocide is a series of ongoing persecutions by the Myanmar (formerly Burmese) government against the Muslim Rohingya people. The genocide has consisted of two phases to date: the first occurred from October 2016 to January 2017 and the second has been occurring since August 2017. The crisis forced over a million Rohingya to flee to other countries. Most fled to Bangladesh while others escaped to India, Thailand, Malaysia, and other parts of South and Southeast Asia.
  The largest wave of Rohingya to flee Myanmar happened in 2017, which resulted in the largest human exodus in Asia since the Vietnam War. 
  The 2016 military crackdown on the Rohingya people drew criticism from the UN (which cited possible "crimes against humanity"), the human rights group Amnesty International, the U.S. Department of State, the government of neighboring Bangladesh, and the government of Malaysia. The Burmese leader and State Counsellor (de facto head of government) and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi has been criticized for her inaction and silence over the issue and has done little to prevent military abuses. Myanmar has also drawn criticism for the prosecutions of journalists under her leadership.
  In late 2016, Myanmar's armed forces and police started a major crackdown on the Rohingya people in Rakhine State in the country's northwestern region. The Burmese military have been accused of ethnic cleansing and genocide by various United Nations agencies, International Criminal Court officials, human rights groups, journalists, and governments including the United States. The UN has found evidence of wide-scale human rights violations, including extrajudicial killings; gang rapes; arson of Rohingya villages, businesses, and schools; and infanticides, which the Burmese government dismisses as "exaggerations".
  Using statistical extrapolations based on surveys conducted with a total of 3,321 Rohingya refugee households in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, a study estimated in January 2018 that the military and local Rakhine Buddhists killed at least 24,000 Rohingya people and perpetrated gang rapes and other forms of sexual violence against 18,000 Rohingya Muslim women and girls, 116,000 Rohingya were beaten and 36,000 were thrown into fires.
  The military operations displaced a large number of Rohingya people that spurred a refugee crisis. According to UN reports, over 700,000 Rohingya people had fled or had been driven out of Rakhine State and took shelter in neighboring Bangladesh as refugees as of September 2018. In December 2017, two Reuters journalists who were covering the Inn Din massacre were arrested and imprisoned. Foreign Secretary Myint Thu told reporters Myanmar was prepared to accept 2,000 Rohingya refugees from camps in Bangladesh in November 2018.
  The 2017 persecution against the Rohingya Muslims and non-Muslims has also been declared as ethnic cleansing and genocide by various UN agencies, ICC officials, human rights groups, and governments.
  The UN described the persecution as "a textbook example of ethnic cleansing". In late September 2017, a seven-member panel of the Permanent Peoples' Tribunal found the Burmese military and authority guilty of the crime of genocide against the Rohingya and the Kachin minority groups. Suu Kyi was again criticized for her silence over the issue and for supporting the military actions.
  Subsequently, in November 2017, the governments of Bangladesh and Myanmar signed a deal to facilitate the return of Rohingya refugees to Rakhine State within two months, which drew mixed responses from international onlookers.
  In August 2018, the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights declared that Burmese military generals should be tried for genocide when they reported their findings of the investigation into the August–September 2017 events.  On 24 September 2018, Jeremy Hunt, the British Foreign Secretary, held a meeting with some other foreign ministers on the sideline of the United Nations General Assembly to discuss the crisis in Rohingya.
  On 23 January 2020, the Inte
caption: Destroyed Rohingya village in Rakhine state, September 2017
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